The Kink

Ray Davies

Among the giants of the British Invasion, there was perhaps none more British than Ray Davies, the leader of the Kinks. The band, in its heyday, didn’t even come to the United States; a four-year touring ban, following a dispute in 1965 with promoters and management, helped insure that Davies’s songbook, esteemed as it is, would retain a recondite streak—and that Davies might be most enduringly imagined hiding out in Muswell Hill, composing rockers about London sunsets and afternoon tea.

And yet for many years, in stretches from the seventies into the nineties, Ray Davies was, very quietly, a New Yorker—an Upper West Sider, a regular at Zabar’s and Café Lux. He had an apartment in the West Seventies near Central Park West, which, come to think, he wished he still had when he came to town last week to perform at a benefit at Carnegie Hall and promote a new solo album, “Working Man’s Café.” He was staying in a midtown boutique hotel with balky elevators and Euro-lounge lobby music. “Bloody awful,” he declared as he emerged for a noontime tour of his old neighborhood.

He wore a trilby, Ray-Bans, a multicolored scarf, gray stovepipe jeans, and running shoes, and a skeptical expression that belied an affable mood. “The first time I came to New York, with the Kinks, in 1965, we stayed in the Hilton,” he said, heading north on Broadway, toward Columbus Circle. “I was too intimidated to go out. Everybody went out and partied, but I stayed in. I got my six-pack—well, they weren’t six-packs in those days—I got my crate of beer and just drank.”

The Time Warner Center was news to him—“This went up really quickly”—but of little interest. As he walked uptown he pointed out landmarks: the homes or offices of various collaborators or friends—the remastering man, the press agent, the Broadway arranger, the actress from “The Edge of Night” whose story of the cast’s singing its lines in rehearsals (out of boredom) inspired Davies to make the not-so-well-received concept album “The Kinks Present a Soap Opera.”

Davies negotiated the traffic islands by Lincoln Center. Alice Tully Hall: “The Kinks did a gig here in the early seventies and somebody spiked my drink before I went on and I lasted about three songs before I passed out. We got through the show somehow. And afterwards I walked around the city all night, crying, because I’d let everybody down. My manager took me to Elaine’s to cheer me up, but I was inconsolable. And I ended up at Howard Johnson’s in Times Square. I was sitting there, it was like eight in the morning, and a guy next to me said, ‘You’ve been up all night—who do you think you are?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know who I am anymore.’ It was this big black guy sitting next to me, and I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘My name is Joe Frazier and I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.’ “

On Seventy-second Street, he stopped in front of the venerable old Tip Top shoe store. “I used to buy my stage shoes here,” he said. “They were girls’ shoes. Chrissie Evert, the tennis player, had a really great line that had a blue star on the side. I got the biggest size they had.”

Farther east, toward the Park, was his local bar, a dive called Malachy’s. He ducked in to say hello, although not to have a drink. (“I’m not a piss artist,” he said.) He did the same at his old grocery market, Gotham Food, on Columbus Avenue. “Hey, Ray!” the checkout clerk called. “How are you?”

“Where’s the big guy?” Davies asked.

“He’s working tonight.”

On his way in, Davies had said, “I used to see John Lennon in here.” Asked to characterize these encounters, Davies muttered, “Politeness, politeness.” He went on, “I watched ‘Hard Day’s Night’ last night, on the Independent Film Channel, and I got quite caught up in it. I was so busy myself in those days I missed all that. A special bunch of people they were.”

The northern apex of Davies’s sentimental journey was a former Chinese takeout place on Seventy-sixth Street, now a Japanese restaurant, where Davies, picking up a takeout order, had once seen a member of the kitchen staff hit the owner over the head with a stool. “I put my money down, grabbed my food, and walked out,” he recalled.

Davies, heading downtown, remarked on the persistence of locksmith shops and the absence of dog turds, then said, “I’m trying to find something that’s been here forever,” which had a ring to it. “This used to be a great, um—‘used to be,’ “ he said, mocking himself. He recited the first line of a song he wrote recently: “I must remember never to say I remember.” But it’s easy to forget. ♦

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.